What is knowledge & technology transfer?

INDUSTRIAL RESEARCH FUND

A special type of government funding gave birth to the Industrial Research Fund (Industrieel Onderzoeksfonds or IOF) in 2004. To meet the general academic demand for a more attractive and flexible research environment and more diverse types of researchers, this fund enables the development of an elaborated long-term policy for strategic and applied research at universities. Flemish universities receive funding according to their output performance, such as the number of contracts with industry, publications and citations, share in the European Framework Programme for R&D, number of patents and spin-offs.

IOF funds are awarded to research groups that are clearly above the average scale of a standard research unit of a university. IOF groups are able to conceive a detailed roadmap and long-term vision and have strongly motivated how the additional IOF funding can contribute to their proprietary valorisation strategy. These Groups of Expertise in Applied Research or GEARS focus on building a portfolio of applicationoriented knowledge for economic purposes and its effective valorisation. These groups have to prove their existing track record in valorisation activities, as demonstrated by their revenues from industry/licensing revenues, patents and spin-offs.

The Industrial Research Fund also funds proof-of-concept projects that aim to bring scientific research closer to the market and focus on research at a later stage of transition from proof-of-principle to proof-ofconcept. IOF Accelerator projects are designed to support ongoing GEAR programs with a one-off financial injection to achieve a significant acceleration effect in IOF parameters.

The coaching and support of IOF-funded mandates and projects is the responsibility of VUB TechTransfer. All legal information on the Industrial Research Fund can be found in the ‘Besluit van de Vlaamse Regering betreffende de ondersteuning van de Industriële Onderzoeksfondsen en de interfaceactiviteiten van de associaties in de Vlaamse Gemeenschap’.

A portfolio of all research groups that receive IOF funding can be found on vubtechtransfer.be.  TOOLS

LITERATURE STUDY

Before starting or applying for a research project you should conduct a thorough literature study. It documents the state of the art in your field and allows you to justify the need for your own research.  University library catalogue: search for scientific literature.  Google Scholar: provides an easy way to search widely for scholarly literature in many disciplines and sources: peer-reviewed papers, theses, books, abstracts and articles, from academic publishers, professional societies, preprint repositories, universities and other scholarly organisations.  Patent search: see below

PRIOR ART SEARCH

To assess the patentability of an invention, a thorough examination of the prior art must be carried out. Prior art is any evidence that your invention is already known. The mission is to find evidence that disproves the novelty of your idea, invention, research results. You hope you will fail of course, but try to be your own biggest critic and do not ignore evidence you may not like. Keep a record of everything you look at and everything relevant you find. Also, regularly update your prior art searches as you develop your idea/invention.

PATENT SEARCH

Another preliminary search to check whether your invention is patentable is obviously checking whether any patents already exist. To maximise your chances of finding relevant information, use keywords or search terms which best describe your invention/idea. Obvious key words or general terms will not help. The most productive search terms may be specialist technical terms. It may also take a few preliminary searches to find better keywords. Once you have listed the relevant keywords, prepare strings of up to four keywords (four is the maximum number when using Espacenet, for example) in different combinations. Look for multiples and variants and use abbreviations to cover them (in Espacenet one can use ‘*’). When searching for patents, it is very helpful to use the patent classification system. Try to find out through a number of preliminary searches or by browsing in the list of patent classes (Espacenet provides a separate search function to find the proper patent class) the classes relevant to your invention/idea. It is important not to think too narrowly.

Free public databases:

 European Patent register  Espacenet  Patentscope  US Patent register